Ostwald Ripening in Two Dimensions: Treatment with Pairwise Interactions

TL;DR

This paper extends mean field models to describe Ostwald ripening in two dimensions, deriving analytic pairwise interaction expressions and solving large systems numerically, aligning well with experimental data.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic mean field extension with analytic pairwise interaction formulas for 2D Ostwald ripening, enabling large-scale numerical simulations.

Findings

Good agreement with recent experiments

Analytic expressions for pairwise interactions

Numerical solutions for large droplet systems

Abstract

We present a systematic extension of mean field models for Ostwald ripening in two dimensions. We derived, using a mean field type approximation, an analytic expression for pairwise interactions between the minority phase droplets. These interactions appear in dynamic equations for the droplets' radii and positions, which are solved numerically for systems of tens of thousands of droplets, yielding very good agreement with recent experiments.